However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results

Thanks to the good ol’ Steam sale I snapped up a bargain “Gold Edition Upgrade” for Civilisation V with a bunch of DLC and the Gods & Kings expansion, so if I ever get around to finishing my ongoing campaign (where I’m feeling slightly guilty about bombarding enemy cavalry with MLRS units) I can kick off another bout of world domination with even more options. The addition of trading cards to Total War: Shogun 2 also prompted me to get that patched up, and dust off another campaign that ground to a halt last year sometime. Today I picked up another umpteen hours of strategy action with the Wargame bundle; I was a fan of R.U.S.E. so I’d had my eye on the imaginatively titled series for a while, especially after a positive review from hex-maestro Tim Stone of Wargame: AirLand Battle (presumed tagline: “It’s a wargame with both air and land battles”; I hope Eugen expand into other genres and release Fightinggame: Cartoon Characters Punch Other Cartoon Characters, or Drivinggame: Cars Drive Around Trying To Drive Around Faster Than Other Cars).

It’s something of a cliché to have a Steam library backlog longer than the average human lifespan, but when Galactic Civilisations II Ultimate Edition popped up in a Flash Sale I had to resist, otherwise the only strategy game I’d ever play would be trying to allocate the time and bandwidth resources needed to download and play a library full of strategy games…